Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Sunday March 3, 2002
Victoria Thieberger

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who has backed calls for action against Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe over claims he is rigging this week's presidential election, said African states had joined forces to protect one of their own.

"There is very much a regional view in Africa that they want to do a certain amount to protect a fellow country," Downer said on the sidelines of the Commonwealth leaders summit here.

"There is this whole notion of Africans protecting themselves against the criticism of countries outside," Downer said.

Mugabe has been accused of vote rigging, political intimidation and violence in the lead up to the March 9-10 presidential election. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai poses the biggest threat to Mugabe since he came to power 22 years ago when Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain.

"Africa was colonized by Europeans," Downer told Australian television. "Africans, as time went on, grew to resent and despise that colonization ... and there is still that very strong sense that Britain and other countries (are) sometimes being neo-colonialist."

The Commonwealth -- largely a group of former British colonies -- has been under pressure to follow the United States and the European Union and impose sanctions on Zimbabwe.

But that move has been supported chiefly by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain itself. One-third of the 54 Commonwealth members are African states which have resisted, while many of the others prefer to save a decision until after the election.

On the second day of their March 2-5 summit, Commonwealth leaders met in a retreat to try and reach a compromise, but they look set to take no action.

Reflecting the African opposition to punitive action against Mugabe, Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa said any action before the election would be premature.

"I do not like the assumption that unless Mugabe or (his ruling party) ZANU-PF loses the election there then this election will not be free or fair," Mkapa told reporters here.

"I say wait until the observers have commented and it will be national observers there and international observers, let's listen to them," he said.

KYOTO AND AIDS ALSO ON AGENDA

Though Zimbabwe dominated Sunday's discussions, for Pacific and Caribbean island nations a more pressing concern at the talkfest was global warming , which threatens to engulf some low-lying islands such as Tuvalu and the Maldives.

Prime Minister of the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalua, Koloa Talake, pleaded with large Commonwealth nations like Australia to save his sinking island home.

"These islands used to be my playgrounds when I was 10 years old but where are they? They are gone, disappeared, vanished," the 60-year-old premier told a news conference.

Tuvalu, a string of nine islands and atolls, barely reaches more than five meters above sea level. It faces drowning within 50 years unless there are sharp reductions in emissions of gases blamed for global warming and rising waters.

Talake said the Australian government, which has expressed sympathy with Washington's rejection of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on climate change, should consider the danger posed by pollution and rising sea levels.

The Kyoto treaty was scuttled by the United States, which last month came up with a voluntary plan to combat global warming rather than the mandatory limits the treaty sought to impose.

The fight against HIV -AIDS in the world's poorest nations which dominate the Commonwealth was also on the agenda with the release of a report here warning that 60 percent of the world's HIV-AIDS cases occurred in Commonwealth.

"How Commonwealth countries respond to AIDS will be a large part of determining the effectiveness of the world's response to AIDS," said the report titled "HIV-AIDS-A Gobal Emergency."

The joint report, by the Commonwealth Secretariat and a non-government group, said that if all the Commonwealth states managed to combat HIV-AIDS as successfully as Australia then the global HIV burden could be halved.

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